Mobile advertising in the United States is projected to increase rapidly in the next few years with some estimates forecasting an increase from $213 million in 2009 to $2.02 billion in 2014. With some projections indicating that mobile advertising will be bigger than television advertising in a short period of time. Some sources estimate that people spend eighty percent (80%) of their disposable income in a three (3) to five (5) mile radius of their home or office. Providing an effective way to precisely target advertisements to individuals within such a defined geographic area is needed.
Existing solutions allow the content and/or ad publisher to target content and/or ads to consumers based on their geographic location by using a point-radius method, IP address, zip code or city. These methods deliver content and/or ads to wide target areas, failing to target small or more granular areas. For example, point-radius method limits targets to a circular radius, such as five miles, while IP address, zip code and city are unable to target neighborhoods, townships without zip codes, streets, categories, etc. The short comings in the prior art include: (1) geo-target ad delivery based upon a radius of a specific location, for example, deliver an advertisement within a five-mile radius of the location; and (2) deliver content and/or ads based upon industry defined locations including zip code, city or IP address. None of the existing providers can deliver content and/or ads based upon content and/or ad publisher's defined regions.
New and improved methods are needed by content and/or ad publishers to target content and/or ads to geo-aware devices based on smaller and/or more granular publisher-defined and customized geographic regions.